The unique free rein U.S. rail companies enjoy has led to disastrous accidents. Now they’re preparing to ship even more hazardous materials through our communities


NTSB - Xinhua - Getty Images

Maya van Rossum
Fri, March 3, 2023

The Norfolk Southern freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio on Feb. 3, 2023, was an unmitigated disaster that inflicted tremendous harm on people’s health, safety, and our environment. It’s time our government serves the interests of our communities and stops cowering to the demands of the railway industry.

There are plenty of opportunities for the government to cast their vote in support of our environment, such as saying “no” to special permits for more hazardous substances transported by rail and “yes” to needed regulations.

Despite the devastating consequences resulting from train accidents, incidents, and derailments involving hazardous substances, and the known lack of critical protections to minimize or avoid these catastrophic consequences, the railway companies have been seeking special permits that will allow them to bring more hazardous substances by rail into our communities–including dangerously hazardous and flammable liquified natural gas and cryogenic ethane.

Special permit applications are currently under consideration at the Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) that would allow these additional dangerous substances to barrel through our communities on rail lines and under the primary oversight of the rail companies, not government officials. However, the rail companies have proven themselves untrustworthy–it’s literally like the fox guarding the henhouse. The Norfolk Southern derailment should give all in government pause–and at this critical juncture convince PHMSA that there must be no special permits for new or additional hazardous substances transported by rail.

At the very same time, the railway companies, including Norfolk Southern, have been forcefully opposing essential regulatory upgrades designed to protect local communities and the environment, including opposing regulations that would make the transportation of hazardous substances on our rail lines less dangerous.

Sadly, government decision-makers have been listening and either failed to put in place obvious and needed regulatory mandates to protect our communities and environments–or even rolled back existing protections. It’s time to turn that tide.

We know what protections are needed to improve the safety of transport by rail. Among the gaps in protection under the current regulatory scheme that may have prevented the devastating outcomes in East Palestine are:

There are no requirements for electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brake systems that help multi-car trains brake more evenly, quickly, successfully, and safely.


There is no obligation for rail lines to join any unified command formed in response to a catastrophic event that joins the rail company response with emergency responders and government leaders so they can jointly assess the impacts, threats, and most appropriate safety precautions for both people and the environment–and more effectively put those decisions into action.


There is no obligation to immediately notify all responsible government agencies and entities when an incident or accident has occurred, including providing full and accurate information on any dangerous substances or conditions involved.


There is no obligation to work with communities and first responders across their system to create and practice emergency response plans, including sharing basic information on the hazardous substances emergency responders need to be prepared to deal with.


Rail workers lack basic protections that better support optimal performance, such as paid sick leave and sufficient staffing to carry out essential safety checks, which are becoming ever more important as the rail lines continue running longer and heavier trains with an increasing number of cars carrying a multitude of dangerous chemicals and substances.

All of this sounds like basic common sense, doesn't it? As Norfolk Southern and other rail line catastrophes have demonstrated, unless these kinds of basic and common-sense protections for communities and the environment are codified as legal mandates, the companies will never implement them, even if it ensures public safety

The rail companies are certainly not the only industry transporting hazardous substances where catastrophic events inflict devastating harm. What sets them apart is their unilateral decision-making authority in the face of a disaster–and unwillingness to coordinate with first responders and government agencies to protect the greater good. These problems are largely unique to the rail companies’ operating standards.

The value of mandatory reporting, advance emergency planning, ongoing preparedness, obligatory coordination as part of a unified command, and basic advance safety precautions is well demonstrated when it comes to shipping tankers on the water.

For example, when the Athos I oil spill discharged 265,000 gallons of crude oil into the Delaware River, the mechanisms in place allowed for the proper response in terms of containment and cleanup, as well as public safety and information. This included the mandate for full participation by all responsible parties in a unified command structure, including an established pathway of communication between all parties and with the public, the obligation of immediate and ongoing notifications and information-sharing by the company responsible for the spill, advance emergency planning and regular drills practicing appropriate response for when the inevitable catastrophic accident does occur, well-developed relationships among government and emergency response personnel, strategically placed and accessible emergency gear, and response personnel assured by the industry through membership in an entity like the Delaware Bay and River Cooperative.

The collaboration allowed for a swift and comprehensive emergency response with regular pathways of communication to the impacted and concerned public. This comprehensive, experienced, and well-rehearsed response action was not unique to the Athos I spill–it is a reflection of the regulatory mandates and clear lines of responsibility enshrined in law for catastrophic spill events on our nation’s navigable waterways.

Certainly, communities and the environment suffer when there is an on-water catastrophe like an oil spill. However, the kind of misinformed chaos where the responsible industry is given almost carte blanche to hide information and undertake a self-serving response is not the norm across industries. It’s only the norm when it comes to railway companies.

Norfolk Southern representatives have said: “We are going to learn from this terrible accident and work with regulators and elected officials to improve railroad safety.”

“From day one I’ve made the commitment that Norfolk Southern is going to remediate the site,” CEO Alan Shaw asserted. “We’re going to do it through continuous long-term air and water monitoring. We’re going to help the residents of this community recover and we’re going to invest in the long-term health of this community and we’re going to make Norfolk Southern a safer railroad.”

Independent government assessments of the company’s response make it hard to give such claims much credence. In a Feb. 14 correspondence addressed to Shaw, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro characterized the company’s response as giving “inaccurate information and conflicting modeling” that made protective action more difficult, that it was unwilling to work with government agencies and first responders in ways that made them less able to respond effectively. He went so far as to characterize the company as being driven by “corporate greed, incompetence and lack of care for … residents.”

Given the industry’s proactive efforts and investment in preventing essential protective regulatory protections that could have avoided the harm, the promise of support for improved safety mandates moving forward rings hollow–and at the very least is way too little given way too late.

After the devastation inflicted on the communities and environments of East Palestine, Ohio and Beaver County, Pennsylvania, it’s time for stronger regulatory protections with regard to the rail lines traversing the communities of our nation. The authorities should reject all requested special permits that would allow additional hazardous substances–such as the liquified natural gas and/or cryogenic ethane permit application currently under consideration by PHMSA.

For those interested in learning more or taking action to challenge plans to transport more LNG by rail, you can learn more and act here.

Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, is the leader of the regional (4-state) Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and founder of the national Green Amendments For The Generations.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

East Palestine Derailment Triggers ‘an Uneasy Feeling’ in a Growing Petrochemical Hub

Eve Andrews, Grist
Fri, March 3, 2023

A truck turns down an alleyway on N. Market Street as dusk settles in on February 25, 2023 in East Palestine, Ohio.

This story was originally published by Grist. 

Chris Laderer was 34 days into his tenure as chief of the volunteer fire department in Darlington, Pennsylvania, when the station received a call that a train had caught fire in the neighboring town of East Palestine, just over the state border in Ohio. Laderer assumed that an engine had overheated, but as the crew pulled out of the station he saw signs of something far more disastrous.

“We could see the glow and plume of smoke from our station, and we’re 4 miles from the scene,” he recalled. “We realized we’re getting something much bigger than what we anticipated.”

When Laderer’s team arrived, alongside the fire departments from roughly 80 other towns across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, they found 38 cars of a 150-car train splayed along the tracks, with some emitting flames that smelled, as Laderer described it, of burning plastic. They would learn in the days that followed that 11 cars contained hazardous chemicals, including the highly toxic compounds vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, which are used in the manufacturing of common plastics.

By Monday, three days after the February 3 derailment, the Norfolk Southern railroad company had sent in their own officials and contractors to perform a controlled burn-off of the vinyl chloride. The tactic was meant to prevent, as much as possible, more than 100,000 gallons of vinyl chloride from evaporating into the air and seeping into the soil and creek beds surrounding the train, although an as-yet-unknown quantity of it already had. (“Either we were going to blow it up, or it blows up itself,” Trent Conaway, the mayor of East Palestine, explained at a town hall the next week by way of illustrating a frustrating lack of options.)

But the burn didn’t go quite as planned. A towering, bulbous cloud of black smoke erupted from the train in the explosion and then spread over the surrounding area like a pool of oil, where it hung in the low atmosphere for hours and hours. Experts have attributed the smoke’s stubborn refusal to dissipate to a weather phenomenon called an inversion, where warm air that rises into the atmosphere after a sunny day traps the cold air coming off the ground as night falls. “The smoke that was supposed to stay up started banking down a bit on the area,” Laderer explained.

Jeremy Woods, a mechanic for the Darlington-based trucking company and repair shop Lync, described the scent that permeated the air all of Monday night as that of charred PVC pipe, but with a hint of chlorine that reminded him of the YMCA pool. Trisha Blinkiewicz, whose home sits about 4 miles east of the derailment, went to dinner in nearby Chippewa, Pennsylvania, on that same Monday evening. She found the town buried in a low-lying fog that felt thick on the skin, with a distinct, abrasive smell of burnt plastic.

The train that crashed in East Palestine derailed about 20 miles northeast of its destination of Conway, Pennsylvania, one of the industrial towns and small cities that line the Ohio River as it flows west from its mouth in Pittsburgh. The Upper Ohio River Valley — which stretches, roughly speaking, from that mouth down to where West Virginia meets the tip of Kentucky — has been the site of proliferating petrochemical development over the past decade, as oil and gas companies turn their attention away from fuel and toward a much richer prospect: plastics.

Ethane gas fracked from the Marcellus Shale, which extends across Pennsylvania into the eastern edge of Ohio and northern West Virginia, can be “cracked” into ethylene, a flammable gas critical to the production of plastics used for packaging, bottles, and electrical insulation, among other products. And all of the infrastructure that is required for every step of plastic production and transport — wells, pipelines, refineries, ports, plants — has spread like a spider’s web over the region.

Read Next: The train derailment in Ohio was a disaster waiting to happen

The accelerating petrochemical development is simply the newest incarnation of industrial exploitation for a region that has been plagued by legacy pollution since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The pressing question is whether the people who have lived here for generations have hit their breaking point, and whether they feel empowered to demand more from the corporations that threaten their homes and the politicians that enable them.

“Honestly, I never expected this big an incident to happen in my entire life, let alone my first month as fire chief,” said Laderer. “And Norfolk Southern are not telling us a lot, and they’ve got me questioning things.”

The unique Appalachian topography of the greater Ohio Valley tends to fortify the pollution created within it, as if the geology that had endowed the region with such bountiful fossil fuel and mineral reserves also cursed it to suffer more for them. Major industrial facilities and railroad hubs are usually established on the river, for ease of both transportation and waste disposal, and the emissions that they produce get trapped by the steep hillsides that frame the tributaries.

The Shell cracker plant, which began operations in the fall of 2022, is a sprawling behemoth on the edge of the Ohio River in Monaca, Pennsylvania, directly across the river from the derailed train’s destination in Conway. The plant, which is widely considered to be a grim arbiter of future petrochemical development in the region, takes locally fracked gas and breaks it down at a molecular level to manufacture the ethylene “nurdles” — translucent plastic pellets the size of a grain of arborio rice — that make up many household and single-use plastics.

Residents of eastern Beaver County, which is quite rural, say that they have not personally felt the adverse effects of the Shell plant. They do not smell chemicals in the air or see nurdles floating in the creeks near their homes, unlike those who live downstream of the plant. They are more or less protected by the same topography that traps pollution around the facilities that create it, with a buffer of hills and hollers that rise and fall between their communities and the plant itself. But the derailment in East Palestine on February 3 brought the more disastrous consequences of plastic production far closer to home.

Ron Stidmon moved from New York City to Enon Valley, Pennsylvania, in 2003, seeking stillness and solitude after having lost several friends in the 9/11 attacks. Enon Valley, which sits a few miles northeast of East Palestine on the border between Beaver and Lawrence counties, is secluded and quiet, dotted with both Amish farms and sprawling properties. Stidmon bought a farm, unsuccessfully tried to make a lot of different crops work, and finally cracked the code of profitability with garlic. He has steadfastly committed to organic practices on his land for 20 years, to the extent where he grumbles when a neighbor burns a tire on an adjacent property.

When Norfolk Southern performed the controlled burn-off of vinyl chloride on February 6, Stidmon recalled, “it looked like the end of the world with the smoke coming up.” He’s now watching the wells and ponds on his property daily, with no other option than to simply wait for testing to learn if carcinogenic chemicals from the derailment have leached into the aquifer. He’s optimistic that his water supply will be spared of contamination, simply because he’s upstream of the crash.

“If we were a mile or so west, it would be completely different. If the winds had been blowing a different direction, it would have been different,” he said. “It’s a matter of luck — has nothing to do with having a plan, or setting up that we’re safe.”

Stidmon had been anticipating a disaster like this for years. In 2016, he was on the Darlington Township’s Board of Supervisors, where he began to raise the issue of railroad safety. He was concerned by the sheer volume and frequency of trains routed along the track that wraps around Darlington, running north through the village of New Galilee, east across Enon Valley, and over the state border into East Palestine. According to Stidmon, he spent a year trying to get Norfolk Southern to simply provide the number of trains that came through in a day. When months went by and the company never answered, he and a few neighbors got together to stay up for 24-hour shifts, watch the tracks, and count. The figure at which they arrived was 60.

“[Norfolk Southern] won’t do anything to address the people’s concerns, to address legitimate problems. They have such a cavalier attitude: ‘This is our track, our business.’ It’s discomfiting to know that anything can happen, with practically no repercussions,” said Stidmon. “You can live your own life as clean as you want, but these guys can destroy everything you’ve done to keep it clean for yourself.”

Jason Blinkiewicz owns the trucking company and repair shop Lync, which is located a little over a mile from the derailment. He lives in Enon Valley, where the railroad runs right in front of his house. (On the night of February 3, he and his wife, Trisha, found that the engine of the train that had crashed had “cut and boogied” to come sit on the tracks in their front yard.) He, like most of his neighbors and employees, doesn’t trust Norfolk Southern and assurances from the Environmental Protection Agency that the air and water have been safe to breathe and drink. The borough of Enon Valley commissioned independent testing of wells and streams, and the community is awaiting results.

“It’s normalized to some degree because there’s already low air quality in the area,” Blinkiewicz said. “The cracker plant is putting out volatile organic compounds, or what’s the nuclear power plant doing, or how about the coal plant right behind it that they shut down not that long ago? What about the mills in Midland and the steel plant in Koppel?”

But all of those facilities are far enough from Blinkiewicz’s home and workplace that he hasn’t felt their impacts nearly as acutely as those of the derailment. “I think it’s the first time, in my 46 years on this planet, in this area, that it gives you an uneasy feeling about everything,” he said.

“And as much as it pains me to say, my trust has to lie in our government. Which is hard to do, right? But we have to rely on those government agencies to protect us. That’s what they’re there for.”

On the night of February 15, East Palestine hosted a town hall at the local high school for residents to ask questions of both state and federal EPA officials. (Representatives from Norfolk Southern pulled out hours before the meeting due to “the growing physical threat” to their employees’ safety. Those threats have not been substantiated.) Volunteers with the East Liverpool, Ohio-based community group River Valley Organizing, were standing outside of the high school’s front door passing out flyers for the group’s own town hall to take place the following week.

Amanda Kiger, director of the group, is familiar with the pervasive distrust of government, regardless of political orientation, in the Ohio Valley region. It is hard to have faith in one’s representatives with a centuries-long legacy of politicians whose loyalties have been bought by industry.

“Historical pollution has been just layered on this region for so long,” Kiger said several days later in an interview. Stoneware potteries, coal mines, and steel mills mostly died off to be replaced by refineries, hazardous waste incinerators, unconventional gas wells, and petrochemical facilities. “And when you look at communities that are environmentally devastated, bad and polluting commerce attracts more bad and polluting commerce. They can go: ‘We didn’t do that, they did that, that’s been there for years.’”

Two days before the town meeting, a week after the black cloud of burning vinyl chloride spread over East Palestine and its neighboring towns, residents around the Shell cracker plant about 20 miles southeast started to post reports of a large flame emitting from it.

The flame was evidence of a “flare,” which is a mechanism meant to regulate malfunctioning of the plant’s machinery by expelling excess hydrocarbons into the air. This flaring, while preventing a more disastrous outcome for the plant and its surroundings, pumps volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere. In just a few short months since being operational, Shell has already exceeded its annual allowance of VOC emissions as permitted under the Clean Air Act and the Pennsylvania Air Pollution Control Act. That’s in spite of the fact that the facility has the second-highest permit for VOC emissions in the state. In fact, the environmental organizations Clean Air Council and Environmental Integrity Project intend to sue Shell for the plant’s early violations.

Read Next: Amid hopes and fears, a plastics boom in Appalachia is on hold

Due to bureaucratic delays from both Shell (which is required to notify the community of flaring activity) and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, it can sometimes take as long as a month for residents of Monaca and the surrounding towns to learn that a plant malfunction happened. But the resident groups Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community (BCMAC) and Eyes on Shell have asked local “watchdogs” to post whether they’ve observed a flare or felt changes in the scent or feel of the air around the plant.

Anaïs Peterson, a volunteer with Eyes on Shell, notes that in the months prior to the Shell plant’s official opening in November, the group of concerned citizens that she helped convene would see about 40 attendees at their monthly meetings. By January of this year, several months and multiple flaring events into the plant’s operations, that number had tripled.

“Sometimes the bad things that happen in the community are the moments you can bring folks together,” said Kiger. “And it takes the community coming together to push back on federal and state legislators.

“But am I really sick and tired that my community is the casualty, and we have to be the message-bringers? Absolutely. It’s getting overwhelming.”

On the evening of February 23, dozens of residents from within several miles’ radius of East Palestine crowded into a small storefront on the town’s commercial thoroughfare for River Valley Organizing’s town hall event, spilling out of the main room into the lobby and kitchen. A panel of independent experts in environmental cleanup and hazardous chemicals answered questions from the community. The atmosphere darkened as those in the room processed new information: that the EPA had not been testing air, water, or soil samples for dioxins, potential toxic byproducts of the vinyl chloride explosion that can persist in land and sediment for decades without proper cleanup.

As the evening went on, the questions grew more distressed: When I go home tonight, what is the first thing I can do to make sure the air is clean for my children to breathe? How can I protect my livestock and pets that roam land that might be contaminated with dioxins? Is my home ruined forever? And, above all: How do we make sure Norfolk Southern sees justice for what they’ve done to us?

“You would have tripped over your own shoes without a flashlight, the smoke was so thick — like being in a cave,” said one resident of New Springfield, Ohio, a few miles northwest of the derailment, who expressed concern to the experts assembled that he couldn’t safely grow produce and raise livestock on the land that had been contaminated by that smoke. “We’ve been pretty self-sufficient, and now we’re zero self-sufficient. What do you pay property taxes on 40 acres for if you can’t grow a tomato?”

One of the great, enduring appeals of rural American life is the dream of complete independence. You buy property, build a homestead, grow food, raise your family. Your children play in the creek in the summer and ride sleds down sloping white hills in the winter. But when one powerful corporation’s mishap puts all of that at risk, it becomes clear that a so-called independent existence is only protected through the strength of community.

“I don’t care if you’re red or blue, I don’t care if I beat you up in the bar 10 years ago,” said Jamie Cozza, an organizer for River Valley Organizing and lifelong resident of East Palestine, before urging those gathered to contact every elected official in the region. “We need to come together right now and use our voices, because no one else is going to fight for us.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/transportation/east-palestine-derailment-has-neighbor-towns-uneasy/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

Learn more at Grist.org

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U.S. Railroad Managers Told Employees to Ignore Wheel Bearing Problems

Owen Bellwood
Fri, March 3, 2023 

A photo of the Ohio train crash from above with rail cars spread around the scene.

A train carrying hazardous materials crashed in East Palestine, Ohio, last month.

Last month, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying 20 cars filled with hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. After the crash, safety experts decided the best course of action was to carry out a controlled burn of the toxic chemicals inside the cars, to prevent an enormous explosion that they warned would send shrapnel flying for miles around.

It was a disaster of epic proportions and has since sparked outrage over the handling of the crash and the concerns that were raised in the buildup to the incident. Now, The Guardian has uncovered audio that includes a rail worker being told by their superior to skip certain safety checks that could have uncovered the faulty components that caused February’s rail incident.

According to the outlet, a leaked audio recording heard an employee query their manager about safety checks on wheel bearings. In the clip, the manager is heard telling the employee to stop making such checks and marking cars for repair in order to speed up train times. The site reports:

In late 2016, Stephanie Griffin, a former Union Pacific carman, went to her manager with concerns that she was getting pushback for tagging – or reporting for repair – railcars. Her manager told her it was OK to skip inspections.

Griffin asked if the manager could put that in writing. “That’s weird,” said the manager. “We have 56 other people who are not bad-ordering stuff out there. You’re definitely not going to get in trouble for it.”

Griffin said: “He refused to bad-order [mark for repair] cars for bad wheel bearings. My boss took issue with it because it increased our dwell time. When that happened, corporate offices would start berating management to release the cars.”

A photo of construction equipment clearing the site of the Ohio derailment.

The crash spewed toxic fumes into the air following a controlled burn of the hazardous cargo.

The audio is particularly bad as initial investigations into the Ohio crash have so far found that a faulty wheel bearing could have caused the incident. In the case of the Norfolk Southern derailment, investigators found that wheel bearings on the train were 253°F above ambient temperature in the lead-up to the incident.

The increased temperature on the wheels was detected by hot bearing detectors (HBDs) that lined the train’s route, which should have warned rail workers of the issues onboard. However, Norfolk Southern’s policy to stop trains only when sensors pick up temperatures 170°F or higher meant the issue wasn’t addressed as quickly as it could have been.

What’s more, once rail workers on board did apply the emergency brakes, it came too little too late and the train still crashed.

A photo of train wheels on a Norfolk Southern carriage.

Rail workers were told to skip important wheel checks.

But could tightening up on safety checks have prevented the disaster in the first place? Well, according to The Guardian report, workers are supposed to check vital components on trains before marking any defective carriage for repair. But, it warned that management, “at the behest of corporate,” went out of its way to undermine workers doing the job. The site adds:

[Griffin] said: “The regulation at the time stated that a wheel bearing was bad when it had ‘visible seepage’. But that was very vague, and the bosses used that vagueness to their advantage. For me, it was whenever oil was visible on the bearing. For my bosses, they wanted actual droplets and proof it would leak on the ground.”

Despite the stark findings from The Guardian’s report, and the news that safety measures on railroads were rolled back during the Trump administration, rail operator Union Pacific made steps to assure the site that “nothing is more important than the safety of Union Pacific employees and the communities we serve.”

A photo of smoldering train cars following the Ohio crash.

The train derailed on February 3rd.

In The Guardian’s report, a statement from the rail company said: “Employees are expected and encouraged to report concerns, and have a number of avenues to do so, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline and they are firmly protected from retaliation.”

Of course, the National Transportation Safety Board is still undertaking its investigation into the Norfolk Southern derailment, including focusing on the company’s use of wayside defect detectors, which should have spotted the failed bearing, and its rail car inspection practices.

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